


Mythbusters: Space Edition

by The Curator of The Sands (GrimRevolution)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Family, Friendship, Gen, Science, a lot of science
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-16
Updated: 2017-04-16
Packaged: 2018-10-19 11:20:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10638798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrimRevolution/pseuds/The%20Curator%20of%20The%20Sands
Summary: Hunk and Pidge PresentMythbusters: Space EditionStarring Coran "I don't know if it'll work but we'll do it anyway" with special guest appearances by Lance, down to clown "DON'T TOUCH THAT BUTTON", Keith "willing to fly anything that's fast" Kogane, Safety First Shiro, and "Certified Explosion Judge" Allura.(Or: space is lonely, science makes it better)





	

 oOo

Prologue

 oOo

The challenge of living on a ship ( _Castle_ , right, it may be called a Castle but it was still a _ship_ ) in space was that everything seemed too long and too short at the same time. While using wormholes could shorten the distance between one place and another, there was still time between floating in the black vacuum because space was mostly—pardon the pun— _space_. There was a fathomable distance between Point A and Point B.

Pidge sat on the observation deck, her legs folded underneath her, hands on her knees as she watched the unmoving glowing dots, each one marking a star. Without the light pollution of Earth, there was nothing stopping a completely bare universe from being open to her gaze. Unlike road trips on earth, however, nothing _moved_. There was nothing to get her attention and hold it—no weird signs trying to attract customers, no animals, just an expanse of stars.

Kansas but with balls of gas rather than corn, that had no changes no matter how long she closed her eyes.

Sometimes space was so _stubbornly_ still.

She closed her eyes and rested her forehead against the glass, sighing in time to the exhaling of the doors behind her as they opened.

“Pidge?”

The Green Paladin grunted as Hunk sat down next to her. “Do you ever notice how big space is?” She asked him quietly, not quite opening her eyes just yet.

“Sometimes,” Hunk rested his elbows on his knees and leaned forward, looking out over the galaxy stretched out alongside them. “Mostly when I miss Earth, though, or when it’s late and I can’t think of anything else.” His voice grew a bit watery at the end, shaking slightly on the edges of syllables.

Reaching over, Pidge patted his knee, “Yeah,” she murmured, “Yeah, I know what you mean.” Sitting there in the dark with questions that couldn’t be answered, their solutions too far. The Green Paladin opened her eyes to look out into the wide expanse of space, tracing invisible constellations, and frowned.

Answerless questions could destroy you. It was better to focus on those that were easier, that had a solution.

Like space.

Pidge narrowed her eyes at the unending little white, red, and yellow dots surrounded by blue, green, and white gases from those that had died and left nothing but gases behind.

“Do stars _move_?”

oOo

Question One:

Do stars move?

oOo

Pidge and Hunk set up everything in the Green Lion’s hangar, ignoring the yellow, glowing eyes of the lion as they pushed an ancient drawing board stolen from someplace else in the Castle (“I’m sure Coran won’t mind,” the smaller teen said, waving her hand at her friend’s concerns) that was clear and flashed with little green and blue lights at the bottom.

Each did something different, as Hunk found out when he accidently pressed one, such as bringing up past drawings and even making an overlay of two different ones. It was the clear predecessor of the hologram projector that was used on the bridge, but worked well enough that, as far as Pidge could see, there were no problems.

They pushed her computers, satellites, and other equipment off into one corner and proceeded to set up the board beside it into a nice, little station. Pidge, unable to bring the board closer to the ground (its height will be something she would fix later), stood on top of a makeshift stool normally used by Coran to reach some high placed panels in the Castle.

“Space,” She said, writing the word at the top with a finger. The letters glowed a dark, pulsing green and she underlined it a couple of times. “Question: Do stars move? Hypothesis,” she paused and looked back at Hunk who was currently sitting on one of the comfortable beanbag-like chairs they had found when raiding the rooms.

“Well, if the universe is constantly expanding—like the Balloon hypothesis, then yes.”

 _Yes,_ was joined with _Balloon Hypothesis_ and then Pidge stepped back, off the stool, and sat in her own pillow-chair. “Okay,” She said and tapped her finger against her bottom lip, “how do we test _that_?”

Both stared at the question on the board and sighed.

“Hypothetically,” Pidge said and Hunk groaned, letting his head fall back. She shoved him roughly in the side, almost knocking him onto the floor. “ _Hypothetically_ we could use an equation.”

“ _Hypothetically_ ,” the engineer repeated, his voice high and squeaky, “ _or_ we can prove it with _actual_ data.” Hunk wiggled his eyebrows at her,“Like measuring the position of the stars in relation to each other.”

Pidge frowned and narrowed her eyes. “That…” She froze and turned her attention to the board, “wait. _Wait_.”

Hunk drummed his fingers on his leg and waited, humming quietly under his breath.

“I was about to say that there was no way to do that without doing calculations and measurements for the rest of our very short lives—in comparison to the universe— _but_ we don’t have to,” She was practically vibrating in her seat, hands pulled up to her chest, brown eyes wide behind her glasses, “because we are in a _spaceship_ that travels by _wormhole_.”

oOo

“You want me to make a wormhole,” Allura said, “so you can measure the amount of distance a star has moved.”

Hunk nodded solemnly, though there was a grin on his face, “yes.”

“ _Please_ ,” Pidge pleaded, folding her hands in front of her and staring up at the princess with bright, shining eyes.

“And if we were to do this,” the Altean said with a single, raised eyebrow, arms cross across her chest, “How would you measure the time that passed for the star while we are travelling through the wormhole?”

Pidge and Hunk stared at her, their mouths gaping before they turned to each other.

“We could _possibly_ make a clock that can withstand being out in space.”

“That could get sucked into the star’s gravitational pull and then it would still be travelling at a speed that would change the data.”

“It would have to be something that could stand being out in space—”

“—and the heat of a star—”

“—without _moving_ —”

The doors to the bridge opened with a _swoosh_ and everyone turned to stare at Keith. The Red Paladin froze where he was like a cat cornered in the dark by flashlights. Pidge almost expected him to hiss at them but the Red Paladin visibly restrained himself from bolting and walked fully past the door.

“Oh,” The Yellow and Green Paladins said, watching him before turning to each other with matching Cheshire smiles spreading across their faces. If anything, that only made the other teen look like a startled raccoon caught right before falling into a trashcan.

The Red Paladin took a step back towards the door and they couldn’t have him escaping, not yet at least.

“Hey, _Keith_ ,” Pidge purred, sliding up to his side and latching both arms around one of his, anchoring him firmly in place, “Keith, would you mind _terribly_ helping Hunk and I out with something? You’d be a _lifesaver._ ”

She was laying it on thick.

By Keith’s narrowed eyes, he wasn’t buying it.

Allura swooped in front of the arms of Voltron, hands on her hips, “no,” she told the small teenager. “No. _Absolutely_ not.”

“But he’s the _perfect_ solution!” Pidge threw her hands up in frustration. “The Red Lion can withstand extreme amounts of heat that the others can’t _and_ Keith could hold a timer and keep track of how much time has passed!”

“What, _exactly_ , is it that you want me to do?”

Hunk stepped forward as Pidge continued to glare at Allura from under her bangs. “We want you to sit above a nearby star and hold a timer while we travel through wormhole from one place to another and then come back. You’ll give us the amount of time that has passed and we’ll measure how much the star has moved.”

“You’d have to keep your position during that time in order for us to get the exact data we need.” Pidge spoke up from beside the engineer, “From there we can use math to calculate the amount of distance that star would travel from its original position at any point of time.”

The Red Paladin looked between the two, his brow furrowed, “why would I have a different time then you? Wouldn’t they be the same?”

Behind Keith, the doors to the bridge opened again and Shiro blinked around at them. He paused halfway through his walk, stopping awkwardly before he could run into anyone. “What’s going on?”

“We want to shoot Keith at a star!” Pidge blurted.

Eyes widening, the Red Paladin stared at the other arm of Voltron, his face just a tiny bit paler than it had been before. “You didn’t say that!”

“You’re not shooting the Red Lion at any star!” Behind them, Allura looked both flabbergasted and amused, but her voice was hard because, at the end of the day, Voltron was still _hers_.

Hunk grinned sheepishly as Shiro turned to him, one eyebrow raised and a slight crinkle to his brow. “We don’t want to _shoot_ him at the star,” the Yellow Paladin corrected, “We just want him to sit above one and hold a timer for us.”

Shiro stared at them, eyes flickering between his fellow teammates before his brow furrowed fully and he frowned. “ _Why_?”

“Yes!” Keith spoke up, his voice high pitched as Pidge clasped herself around his arm, keeping him from fleeing or hiding behind the eldest. “ _Why?!_ ”

“Mostly,” Hunk started, “because we want to use the Theory of Relativity to prove that the Balloon Analogy is correct.”

Shiro blinked a couple of times, confusion painted across his features before he turned to Pidge. “Explain?”

She peeked up around Keith’s elbow and tilted her head to the side, “well,” she said, looking out the screens on the bridge to the universe beyond, “according to the Balloon Analogy, the universe is constantly expanding. So, say, you make three dots that are close together on the surface of a balloon. When you blow it up, the three dots are spread apart further and further the bigger the balloon gets; just like the universe.”

Still holding on to Keith, Pidge sighed, “but that’s not really an accurate depiction because the model is in two dimensions while we live in a three dimensional universe where the expansion of the universe would have to cross over into a _fourth_ dimension which we have never quite been able to prove exists—”

“Pidge!”

“Right,” She grinned sheepishly, “sorry—in any case, the universe is expanding and we don’t want to waste the rest of our lives sitting in front of a star measuring the distance it travels second by second.”

Nodding slowly, Shiro continued to frown, but there was less confusion, “and the theory of relativity?”

Hunk was the one who answered. “The concept of Spacetime and gravitational time dilation,” he said.

“Albert Einstein stated that time and space are just two components of the same thing and the slower that someone or something moves, the slower time will pass for that someone or something,” Pidge continued. “The strength of gravity also makes time pass slower—for instance, you know those satellites back at earth? Well, Astronauts and scientists had to make the clocks calibrated on them slower than those on Earth because time passes faster for them than for the clocks on the planet.”

“So,” Keith started slowly, not seemingly bothered by the human-like koala clinging to his arm and absently brought her closer so she could use his foot as a small stepping stool so most of her weight wasn’t on his shoulder, “that would explain why the clocks on the third floor of the Garrison needed to be adjusted more than those in the basement; because time runs relative to how far or how close you are to the centre of a gravitational pull.”

Pidge stared up at the Red Paladin before she grinned crookedly up at him. “Yes! That’s exactly what happens!” She patted his shoulder proudly before turning back to Shiro, not seeing the Red Paladin turn the same colour as his lion. “Which is why we want to study a star; not just because of the amount of gravity, but because while they are moving through space we will be travelling through wormhole—much faster than any star—so time will be passing far faster for us then for Keith.”

“And then, in order to get accurate data,” Hunk continued, his eyes bright and shining, “we’ll come back and measure the distance the star has travelled and the amount of time that has passed and calculate the distance divided by time to figure out how fast a star moves through space!”

 “But why do we need to do a test?” Allura said, a smile on her face that was as shaky as a California earthquake, “Surely you already know that stars move.”

“We know that they move _hypothetically_ ,” Pidge said, Hunk nodding seriously behind her. “For instance, the Milky Way is encircling a black hole and the entire galaxy in rotating constantly meaning that, by definition, the sun, our star, is moving. _But_ the universe is constantly expanding which means that we are moving around a galaxy that is also moving so how much does a star _actually move_ and how long does it take it _to_ move!”

“So your question,” The princess said, crossing her arms over her chest, “is not _whether_ or not stars move but how _much_ they move.”

The green paladin blinked, frowned, and then turned back to Hunk.

“We have to change our hypothesis.”

**Author's Note:**

> [The Theory of Relativity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity)   
>  [The Balloon Analogy](http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/balloon0.html)
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Physics is really cool.  
> Physics in space is even better.  
> Please note that while the Balloon Analogy is a good example of how space expands it's not perfect--the problems with it are listed within the website I linked but 3rd and 4th dimensions might require some more research if you're not familiar with them.
> 
> Also--don't think about what the distance the Voltron crew is from Earth means when it comes to time and the amount of time that has passed for their families. You'll only make yourself sad.


End file.
